As far as I’m concerned there are 3 reasons one might spend a regrettable evening watching this movie. The first is Golijov's rather nice original score. The second is a brief sound cameo featuring my friend Jeremy exclaiming something in Yiddish from off-screen. The third is Cate Blanchett's wonderful, if somewhat anachronistic, portrayal of a Russian émigré. Blanchett's character is a masterful combination of desperate seductress, anti-Semite, and faithful friend. All of the other characters in the film are stiff, frankly offensive, caricatures. Christina Ricci who, miraculously rescued from a pogrom must sing her way to America to find her father (Oleg Yankovsky), plays a less human version of Feivel the Mouse from "An American Tale." Ms. Ricci, whose childhood alter ego is played by an undeniably cute Claudia Lander-Duke, utters a handful of lines throughout the entire film; what she does say is spoken without the least hint of expression. The doe-eyed gazes that the actress employed so brilliantly in Buffalo’66 simply do not work for this character. Johnny Depp's role as a gypsy horse-trainer is the stuff of bad porn. For a film with the word "cried" in the title, with the exception of Blanchett's aging Russian ballerina and the diva-breakdowns of John Turturro's fascist opera singer, any attempts at emotion are either misplaced, or simply unconvincing.
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